Fact Check: Trump’s Claim About Russian Tanks Avoiding Highways To Kyiv Is False

President Donald Trump claimed this week that Russian forces didn’t reach Kyiv in the early days of the 2022 invasion because tanks were destroyed after getting stuck in mud when a general chose to go through farmland instead of using highways. Military analysts say that’s not what happened.

Experts note Russia tried to advance on Kyiv primarily via roads and highways and suffered heavy losses along them, while also facing fierce Ukrainian resistance and major logistical failures. Mud did hinder some Russian vehicles, but often after road movements stalled. Rob Lee, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s Eurasia Program, said Russian forces “used roads and highways as much as possible during the initial invasion, and took heavy losses on many of them,” adding that limited quality routes from Belarus to Kyiv “canalized their forces.”

A White House official, responding on background, acknowledged Russian tanks did get stuck in mud during and even before the invasion and provided articles mentioning such incidents. But one of those articles directly contradicts Trump’s narrative, noting Russia invaded using Ukraine’s major highways expecting a fast blitz toward the capital.

The assertion is part of a broader pattern of false claims Trump has made about the war, including misstating U.S. versus European aid totals, recasting his past promise to immediately end the war as a joke, mischaracterizing Ukrainian public opinion, falsely saying Ukraine started the war, and wrongly claiming President Volodymyr Zelensky said half of U.S. aid went missing.

Credit: CNN Newsource

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